It started off as a rou­tine story for openly gay New Zealand jour­nal­ist David Far­rier – and led to some­thing more com­plex and trou­bling than he ever en­vi­sioned. See­ing a com­pet­i­tive en­durance tick­ling video on­line, he de­cided he wanted to in­ves­ti­gate it fur­ther and do a short se­quence about it.

His ini­tial in­quiries to the pro­duc­tion com­pany, Jane O’Brien Me­dia, were met with hos­til­ity and ho­mo­pho­bic com­ments. That spurred him to in­ves­ti­gate, trav­el­ing to the com­pany in Los An­ge­les, talk­ing to some of the par­tic­i­pants in the video (in­clud­ing one who was outed – de­spite be­ing straight – after he protested his in­volve­ment in the project) and hav­ing the sit­u­a­tion get odder and odder, in­clud­ing find­ing out who was pulling the strings.

His jour­ney has yielded the ac­claimed new doc­u­men­tary “Tick­led.” We caught up with Far­rier and co-direc­tor Dy­lan Reeve to talk about the movie, the crazi­ness that en­sued and the tick­ling fetish com­mu­nity.